It has been pretty clear that the only passion Big-O has in terms of policy is that taxes have to go up. Pretty much everything into which he has put any effort has been toward this end; O-care, fiscal cliff, etc. The sequester, he envisioned, would be too horrible for anyone to contemplate, including the GOP. The only out, in his view, was to increase taxes. The only question being by how much and on whom. Therefore he wanted the sequester to remain firmly in place for as long as it seemed it would have the desired effect on the opposition. That the strategy has just backfired quite violently now has Barry and the entire administration full of flacks in a panic. Hence the sky-is-falling Chicken Little routines.

“In a way, the world-view of the party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violation, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.” ― George Orwell, Animal Farm